My brief experience with Windows Vista

So, I turned it on for the first time. It took a bit to load, but not any more than XP ever did on my old HP. As soon as I got into it, everything I would do would cause some sort of pop-up where I had to approve of the program opening, or installing, or this or that. Thing is, even this message wasn't consistent. There was 2 or 3 different versions of this confirmation window. So, I installed some stuff, restarted a few times, ran that compatibility scorer (It got a 5 - The RAM was the lowest score). The internet functioned, everything seemed ok. I was able to get back to some of the 'classic' looks and menus, however lots of things couldn't be changed. I went looking for add/remove programs to clean out some of the vaporware that comes on every new computer. Low and behold, they've changed the names of much of the different sections within the control panel. Add/remove was gone entirely and resituated as some sort of question in the corner of the window "Do yo want to remove programs?" Yes, you cock, how helpful are you going to be? Anyway, I delete some useless shit, like WinDVD for example, and pull some of the windows operations like windows movie maker (Why would I use that over Premier?) So I restart to complete the changes and look at that, all of the network connections don't work. Theres no indication of a problem, in fact they all appear to be moving packets and pinging just fine. But nothing comes through.
The other thing that really bothered me was that they removed the disk defragmenter and replaced it with a standby operation that just tries to defragment as soon as you aren't installing something. One thing I absolutely hate is when the hard drive is constantly clicking away. To me, its just accelerated wear and tear one the long term memory of my little scientist here. I swear to god, it never stopped accessing the disk drive the whole time I was using it. It wouldn't last two years going non-stop like that. The defragging thing also started working my externals which, for the same reasons, I don't like. Even if you tell the program not to defrag unless you ask it to, it still pokes around. Worst of all, the program can't be exited.
Long story short, I'm not sold at all, I really don't want to learn a whole not UI like I did when I installed 95 for the first time, or 98, or XP. I've not had an issue with XP itself in almost 2 years now, so I'm happy to stick with it.

Plus, litestep is super rad and the result is tat my desktop is too.